Collaborative Lightweight Deep Learning Optimization for Intrusion Detection in SDN-IoT Networks

The combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has quickly revolutionized the world of industry, and also brought with it some severe security risks. Despite its recent success, Deep learning (DL) can be a powerful method for Network Intrusion Detection systems (NIDS), but often the computational and memory requirements are too high for edge devices. In this paper, a collaborative optimization framework with lightweight deep-learning IDS models suitable for SDN-IoT environments is proposed. We formalize and test three collaborative compression schemes based on combining pruning, clustering, and quantization, yet maintaining the structural advantages of each stage: Sparsity-Preserving Quantization-Aware Training (PQAT), Cluster-Preserving Quantization-Aware Training (CQAT), and Sparsity-and-Cluster-Preserving Quantization-Aware Training (PCQAT). The three schemes are evaluated on four canonical architectures (LSTM, RNN, DNN and CNN) on the proposed SICA dataset with respect to DDoS, Probe and Brute-Force (BFA).The results show that aggressive single-stage compression such as clustering can shrink model size by up to 94%, but at the cost of predictive confidence; PCQAT, by contrast, acts as a stabilizer that recovers this lost confidence. In particular, CNN-PCQAT and DNN-PCQAT deliver the most favorable trade-off, sustaining high detection accuracy on all three attack classes with inference latency below 0.01 ms. The framework therefore offers a practical, deployment-oriented guideline for implementing real-time IDS on resource-constrained SDN-IoT edge devices.